His poems and prose works, great as these are, are not
comprehensible without a study of his letters, which join together the
"insulated fragments" of that grand scheme of truth which he called his
"System" ("Table Talk", 12th Sept. 1831, and 26th June 1834).
Coleridge, in his letters, has written his own life, for his life, after
all, was a life of thought, and his finest thoughts and his most
ambitious aspirations are given expression to in his letters to his
numerous friends; and the true biography of Coleridge is that in which
his letters are made the main source of the narrative. A Biographia
Epistolaris is what we want of such a man.
Coleridge's letters are often bizarre in construction and quite
regardless of the conventions of style, and abound in the most curious
freaks of emphasis and imagery. They resemble the letters of Cowper in
that they were not written for publication; and, like Cowper's, they
have a character of their own. But they far surpass the epistles of the
poet of Olney in spiritual vision and intellectuality. The eighteenth
century, from Pope and Swift down to Cowper, is extremely
rich in
letter-writing. Bolingbroke, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Gray, Mason, Johnson, Beattie, Burns, and Gibbon, among
literary personages, have contributed to the great Epistolick Art, as
Dr. Johnson called it; and this list does not include the letters of the
politicians, Horace Walpole, Junius, and others.
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